the best medicine for grief

Is a hundred-and-one-pound rescue dog: half Mastiff, half Shepherd, and no small amount of wooly mammoth.

Here I am in this new tiny house, with this new massive dog, getting up at dawn to write before I drive my mother’s bucket of a car to my new job, where I sit tethered to a desk from 9 to 5. This new world is strange and pretty, with wild packs of thug mosquitoes, mutant spiders, heat—heat that in heft and force could blind a man and fell him—and every kind of tree: scrubby, piney, stately, savage, towering, or choked by vines. These things require adjustment. But there are also bounties here, pleasures to which the soul adapts quite easily. The quiet. The watercolor cotton sky. The jackpot rattle of the cicadas. Sweet corn and farm-warmed peaches. The unsullied scent of rain.

I want to call my mother and tell her she was right. But, awfully, in this singular…